I can't speak towards the behaviour of pets, but I do have a memory of spell-casting mobs rarely casting teleport in order to engage.

A lot of my memories are pre-t2A: I can't imagine that OSI would have changed this behaviour during t2A, but I can't declare that, 'mobs don't teleport' as of the shards EA-benchmark date.

There is, certainly, a very distinct memory: a dungeon lich which I thought, "Okay, he can't get me (yet)", and then I received a surprise which forced me to switch tactics ...

I do appreciate that anecdotes are not evidence. If evidence can be supplied that will confirm that mobs should (rarely: I'm not kidding; IIRC, it seemed to be random) use teleport, I think that would enhance PvM gameplay.

SS

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SighelmofWyrmgard wrote:

uosa44 wrote:

For sale, by original owner:1 Human Brain, never been used, only slightly damaged, still in original packaging.$1, obo

FTFY.

SS

uosa44 wrote:

The inability for this person to respond in such a crazy manner proves my point.

I can't speak towards the behaviour of pets, but I do have a memory of spell-casting mobs rarely casting teleport in order to engage.

A lot of my memories are pre-t2A: I can't imagine that OSI would have changed this behaviour during t2A, but I can't declare that, 'mobs don't teleport' as of the shards EA-benchmark date.

There is, certainly, a very distinct memory: a dungeon lich which I thought, "Okay, he can't get me (yet)", and then I received a surprise which forced me to switch tactics ...

I do appreciate that anecdotes are not evidence. If evidence can be supplied that will confirm that mobs should (rarely: I'm not kidding; IIRC, it seemed to be random) use teleport, I think that would enhance PvM gameplay.

SS

I agree that in the early days of UO there were some oddities. I recall when liches spawned in Shame ("shame 2 air elemental" area specifically), a lich paralyzed my entire group of friends in a matter of just a few seconds. We honestly thought there was a spell called mass paralyze because of that, when in reality, monsters were able to cast spells extremely fast and/or ignore spell delay.

However, for anything to be adjusted here on UOSA, we need some type of "evidence" that can give us something to run with. The "evidence" we accept is fairly open-ended.

It should be noted that the original question referred to the "all come" command, which made certain animals with a faster walk speed skip on screen as they transitioned between a standing and walking animation. This was fairly common during UOR but didn't actually represent an actual teleport, just a visual skip on the screen.

Second, regarding the broader topic of spellcaster AI on OSI servers, we have some marginal understanding of the demo functions for how monster AI worked, and what information we've seen suggests that teleport isn't something that mobs cast (they do also seem to follow casting delays but aren't frozen as part of the process). Later changes from early UOR with the introduction of behaviors like polymorphing on white wyrms (which evidence suggests was later removed) might have also included the introduction of teleport on mobs as well.

Finally, some considerations on types of evidence. In general, there are a few sources that we'll take information from as a consideration for evidence. The strength of the evidence can largely be viewed as a hierarchy, with certain forms of evidence taking much higher precedence over other types of evidence. As a general rule, here's the list of sources of evidence from strongest to weakest:

Demo

Patch notes

Developer comments

Stratics information

Newsgroup posts

There's also the case of some specialty websites such as the Paxlair guild page, or the taming archive (now only reachable via archives) that may have relevant information that was recorded at the time about OSI servers. These websites are generally hit or miss, and the relevancy of the information is based on how well documented the information is, which is why they don't strictly fall into a hierarchical position.

Please note that these are just general guidelines for evidence, and context has a lot to do with the final strength of any specific piece of evidence.

_________________

UOSA Historian and former staff member: August 11, 2008 - June 19, 2016

There was a point on old UO, where I could say all come and they would actually teleport. People trained wyrms in magery for the ACTUAL teleport spell. If someone locked a wyrm in a tower : You could say follow me, lure the thing to a higher floor, and say all come, it would teleport thru the windows or from the roof to the side.

Another aspect of pets was that I could say all follow me if they were in a house, lure them to the side of a house, gate somewhere, and the pet would come into the gate as well. This actually worked on UOSA for a while, but was removed.

_________________"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me, and it'll happen to you, too." Grandpa Simpson

There was a point on old UO, where I could say all come and they would actually teleport. People trained wyrms in magery for the ACTUAL teleport spell.

This kind of situation recalled from memory is a good example of why evidence is needed to make any changes. So far as we know, teleport was never a spell that was available to mobs to be cast on OSI servers during T2A or likely most mobs during UOR. What we do know about spellcasters on the demo shows that the spell was not available then, nor have there been any patches to indicate that the spell was ever made available to them during the era (it is hinted that certain mobs such as white wyrms were given idle behaviors that might cause them to cast certain spells during early UOR which is where the polymorph bugs originated from).

However, an explanation does exist to talk about what you're referring to, and it has to do with types of movement.

Although this is probably not a question that many player ask, a question that might come across the mind is "Why do dragons, birds, and other flying animals walk when they have wings?". The answer has to do with movement types, insofar as we have information on how that operated, and the problems of which can be readily seen in the demo. At the time of the demo, and likely at the time on OSI servers, certain mobs actually flew. This had to do with including a specific line on the text within the file that described the various stats for mobs in-game, which we have access to an old copy of on the demo (we know that it's an older copy than what was present on live servers at the time because certain features are present within the file that were removed on OSI servers with the last patch). To give you a partial example of the information found in a mob definition, and the included line, here's part of the definition of a dragon:

If you notice, the last line describes a movement type that has been associated with the dragon. At least 3 known types exist within the demo - nonmoving, flying, and amphibious - which related to the movement types that you would expect for each. In the case of the flying movement type, animals that had this movement type would always utilize a flapping animation to move, if they had one, and they would move more quickly than mobs that simply walked. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this type of movement specifically related to what I would generally term as "collision detection" with walls and other such things. Better said using a picture, here's a good example of the problem shown by a dragon spawned on the demo:

Attachment:

flying dragon demo.JPG [ 115.68 KiB | Viewed 2311 times ]

From the picture, you can see that the dragon is flying through the shop in town. The original spawn location for the dragon was just outside the shop. In essence, flying creatures could fly over the tops of walls and directly into various walled off areas as they dropped through the roof tiles that didn't have a surface (all houses except castles, keep and towers), enabling them to get in and out of locations that they would otherwise be unable to get to and from normally. This presented an early problem with the use of the fetch command, and also with houses in jungles having birds idly sitting on the ground inside dwellings. The solution was to remove the movement type from existing mobs, and to remove the movement type setting line from the mob definitions for spawning new mobs, which is why animals with wings just walk.

Now, this likely relates back to your memory of mobs that were stuck in houses as it was possible to have an animal follow you despite being unable to reach you, and if you could successfully lead them to a wall they could fly over, mobs like dragons could indeed fly over them and be retrieved. The important distinction is that this wasn't achieved using teleport, but with the old movement mechanics that were removed.

Of course, an important follow up question is exactly when this particular movement behavior was removed, but we can bound the time that this particular change was made to a pretty small range, and can guess that it was removed rather early on. Namely, it was likely removed sometime between the demo and the introduction of lock downs, and may have even been removed far earlier than that (based on the fact that we're working with an older mob definition file, which could be as old as a beta definition). How can I provide such a time frame? Well, we know that there was a particular exploit of the fetch command that came about with the introduction of nightmares in T2A (see my writeup on the subject here), which could originally fly. Had other mobs been capable of flying at the time, it would have been possible for the exact same exploit to be done with these creatures at the time, yet we know that the exploit was due to the newly added nightmare. Therefore, we can infer that no other mobs had the flying capability, which is specifically cited as the reason for the house break in exploit, and the removal of flying from nightmares.

So there you have it. This is a likely explanation for why certain mobs could be retrieved from houses, and it explains why certain mobs walk. It also likely rules out the possibility of spells like teleport being available to mobs at the time (barring a large body of properly dated evidence).

GuardianKnight wrote:

Another aspect of pets was that I could say all follow me if they were in a house, lure them to the side of a house, gate somewhere, and the pet would come into the gate as well. This actually worked on UOSA for a while, but was removed.

I'll speak with Anarcho about what we currently have for this particular mechanic. There is code in the demo that supports automatically teleporting mobs that you control that are within 3 tiles of the person (but not mounted by anyone else) as they step through the gate.

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UOSA Historian and former staff member: August 11, 2008 - June 19, 2016

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